Friday, June 3, 2016

St. Helena may not be the most recognised country in the
world, but the predicament in which it now finds itself is quite extraordinary,
and deserving of thought.

Approaching the Island

It is isolated, and this simple fact is the cause of the islanders’
current sense of complete isolation, even abandonment. It is so far into
the Atlantic Ocean, and so far from any other land that until last month when
an airport was finally opened it was accessible only with a regular schedule
of the Royal Mail ship, the RMS St. Helena. This vessel served both St. Helena,
and Ascension Island on a complex itinerary that offered the Saints, as the islanders are called, approximately
fourteen sailings off the island each year.

I was fortunate enough to have visited St. Helena with three friends in 2014, and loved every minute of the six-day voyage. Many of our fellow
passengers were working on the airport construction project, an extraordinary
engineering feat, and one that promised to open the island to the outside world
and generate the beginnings of a tourist-based economy.

The RMS St. Helena in Cape Town

We did, however, feel a little perplexed; the generosity
of governments is not well known, and to spend well over £250 million on a
tourism development project for an island of 4,000 people did seem a touch
munificent. “Could it”, we wondered, “have anything to do with the American’s rather
robust presence on Ascension Island?”

Jamestown, the island's major centre

Ascension is a volcanic pile of rock with no indigenous
population, and its attraction is purely based on its strategic location. The
US military built “Wideawake Airfield” there, and although it lies on British
soil and is the home of the RAF Ascension base, the Americans are, as is their
wont, getting increasingly edgy about who goes there.

St. Helena's defences

This is important because civilian traffic between the UK
and the Falkland Islands (remember that war?) use Ascension as a refueling
base, and passengers are now subject to an American veto. There is a
substantial GCHQ base there, the British equivalent of the American NSA, and civilians
working for the BBC, Cable & Wireless and the meteorological services. None
of whom the Americans really want anywhere near there airbase.

Well then; thoughts that Washington might become increasingly
finicky about visitors to this British island and gradually move to an
administrative “occupation”, such as that in Diego Garcia, led us to ponder a
simple question. “Were the British, under the guise of an extremely big-hearted
approach to tourism and the four thousand islanders, actually shifting their
mid-Atlantic base south to St. Helena? Would a new GCHQ base flourish there,
and would this become the UK’s and Europe’s new watching base in the South Atlantic?”

Who knows? Well, some obviously do, but we don’t. Six
days on a ship in the South Atlantic will do this sort of thing to even
reasonable chaps’ minds however, and we had a wonderful time whiling away the
six days afloat pondering.

And also marveling at the engineering masterpiece
the airport was.

Everything had to fit through this archway

Imagine, if you will, building an airport on a remote
island; the first caveat was that there was no dock suitable for landing any serious
equipment, and this necessary facility had to be built from pieces that would
fit through the eighteenth century archway on the Jamestown waterfront.

A 450 metre mountain peak had to be chopped up and moved
to fill in a 450 metre gully in order to create level space for a runway, and
all from original pieces of machinery that could fit through a hole in the wall
that was about 15 x 20’ in size. Remarkable.

The problem today, however, is that this astonishing
airport doesn’t work. The turbulence and wind shear is so great that it appears
to be too dangerous to fly to the airport with any payload at all. There have
been two aircraft land, one a Bombardier Challenger jet, and the other an
Airbus on a proving flight. In both cases, the pilots reported dramatic and
dangerous turbulence, and did not want to fly there again.

Consider the danger; the island is so remote that its
alternate airport is Windhoek, 2,000 kilometres away, and aircraft flying to
St. Helena will have to carry sufficient fuel for this possible diversion; this
means that they will always land “heavy”, and the dangers of an incident on the
runway are difficult to comprehend. There would be no way for emergency medevac
flights to attend and there is no hospital on the island; such an incident
could prove to be extremely grave. Commercial aviation always carries potential
dangers, but those specific to St. Helena mean that the airport must be
unquestionably and categorically sound.

And what of the islanders? So convinced of the airport’s
reliability and the weekly flights that would connect them to the African mainland,
the ship has sailed away into the sunset (well, actually north to the UK) to be
decommissioned and is three weeks from the island. They are running short of
food, there is no plan for the ship to return, although obviously it must do so,
and no aircraft in sight.

Local residents who have invested heavily in the tourism
boom are facing ruin and the game of finger-pointing is starting. One, the delightful
Hazel Wilmot, proprietor of the charming Consulate Hotel and a fellow passenger
on the RMS, has invested £2 million in her property. Now, with no guests, no
way to get on or off the island and no evident solution for the next few
months, her future looks bleak.

It is a delightful island, and with its issues of
approach and departure still so testing, it is no wonder that the British used St.
Helena to assure Napoleon’s exile.